Collaboration in teaching

What does collaboration mean for teachers and how to get it started?

The concept of collaboration in teaching combines two different things, collaboration and teaching, into one common ground. In general, it means doing something together at the same time and place. Collaboration draws attention to cultural, economic, political issues as they promote or inhibit working together. Teaching and education focus on the meaning of education, source of knowledge or nature of knowledge.

Collaboration Teaching Nature of knowledge Source of knowledge​ Collaboration Checklist Glossary   References

Collaboration

 There is a difference between cooperation, coordination and collaboration - use the arrows to see the definitions below.


Collaboration means working out a common understanding in spite of challenges. These can happen due to language barriers, cultural differences, differences in protocols, theft of intellectual property, increase in administrative work, unfair workload, mobility restrictions, different personalities and agendas, readiness to change. Therefore, there is a need for nuanced relations to overcome the issue of the distribution of power-knowledge (Foucault, 2012).

While designing a course, a teacher might follow two sequences, either an analytic one or a synthetic one. The analytic one means going from the whole to separate elements, while a synthetic one means going from separate elements to the whole. However, collaboration in teaching determines the starting sequence of designing a course according to a synthetic sequence because collaborating teachers are already separate elements. Therefore, teachers should look for common elements, either in sense or significance, or in their individual subjects, or in teaching methods. Collaboration in teaching follows a constructive understanding but the level of constructivity can be different.


Teaching


In general, collaboration is about content, methods, or organisational formats leading appropriately to content and goal integration, collaborative methods, or organisational integration. It means that collaboration can adequately include all three, two or one of the above formats. However, collaboration first of all means a change and a crucial thing is not to follow a typical way of thinking. Because though collaboration does not expect members to share fundamentals (Koczanowicz, 2015), it is an entanglement of different facts, knowledge, elements. These might enter different combinations, which might expect some changes, various constructions, new relations. 


        Meaning of education


 In general, education can be understood as 1) subject-specific, 2) cultural, 3) skills and abilities. It is helpful to decide whether we go for in-depth or vast studies, and whether our purposes are determined (teacher decide) or indeterminate (student decide). While collaborating, we should not follow the idea of correlation, when we accidentally associate topics from different fields. Collaboration means finding a structural joint of different fields, which do not value autonomy of each subject. Although our fundamentals might be different, collaboration is two and more people having/sharing the same integrated coherent goal in the distance. Thus, our understanding follows a unified, complex vision of the world, offering an integrated framework, unified for structure of knowledge and not fragmented parts of curriculum.

Nature of knowledge


Our understanding oscillates between static stores/funds of knowledge and dynamic skills to create new elements and use the existing ones (Klus-Stańska, 2018). An integrated goal might be, i.e., mastery, delivery of tasks, grades, skills, competences. Selection of content is based on (1) subjects; (2) current problems; (3) local interests; (4) central theme. Framed/combined contents present unstructured or structured curriculum. Unstructured one means correlated with occasional associations, while structured means integrated with important relationships between specific fields of study. Integration means correlation or interdependence between various contents.

In sum, content relations can be

  •    Unstructured information based on time or space relations, which follow occasional associations without looking in-depth for internal relations of the very contents;
  •   Structured information similar because of their content or contrary to each other;
  • Structured information combined due to cause-effect relationship based on consequences, subordination or superiority

Framing content from the least structured/integrated multilateral learning, through compact learning, to compact whole of particular elements of reality, we get

  1. unstructured integration with other subjects based on incidental references and isolated projects
  2. course based on relationships with other subjects without any collaboration or modification of other subject courses
  3. fusion or blending with another content or subject area
  4.   integration of groups of subjects
  5. whole curriculum based on the integration of all subjects
  6. seamless curriculum with no subject area boundaries. (Mikrut, 2002)


Source of knowledge​


It is between teaching and learning, from stores of knowledge to skills, on the continuum from teachers to students. As there are more teachers, it is combined with organisational integration and different organisational formats:

  1. faculty from diverse departments teaching a cross-disciplinary/ multidisciplinary / interdisciplinary / transdisciplinary course
  2. faculty from similar departments rotating section to section;
  3. team members presenting all sections of the course together.

There are following team teaching styles:

(1) the interactive model when educators co-teach, interact and communicate with each other;

(2) parallel teaching – splitting the group in two;

(3) stationary teaching – dividing the group into stations with each teaching another part of content;

 (4) participant-observer model when one educator teaches and the other person observes, and then they alternate their roles;

(5) rotational model when educators come separately and teach their specific areas or sections.


Collaboration Checklist


Discussing and agreeing on a collaboration playbook can make a big difference in how harmonious and efficient co-working will be


Glossary  

  • Cross-disciplinary - general something which involves more than one discipline
  • Curriculum – organisation of content which focuses on the totality to be taught and aims to be realised (Markee, 1997). Curriculum can be structured following (1) linear; (2) convergent, i.e., fused around a common theme with tangent points/ issues; or (3) spiral way (Mikrut, 2002). We need basic (key, crucial, central) concepts/centres of interest/ themes and their elements to integrate purposes with students and universities goals.
  • Interdisciplinary – via multidisciplinary process teamwork increasing the level of collaboration and communication amongst team members, and the integration of each team member’s findings
  • Lesson format – 3 basic formats (1) synthetic form - problem-based;(2) analytic form - theme-based / centres of interest; (3) basic (supplementary to educational process)
  • Multidisciplinary - members from different disciplines work in a isolated and self-contained manner, in parallel or sequentially to address a problem of common interest
  • Power-knowledge relations – formalized schema and processes typical for a discipline presented by a person who knows (Foucault, 2012)
  • Readiness to change - people present different attitude towards changes:(1) Reactive - people look towards the past ; (2) inactive – preserve „status quo” – don’t rock the boat ; (3) Pre-activist style – „riding the tide” – people do not work for the present but think about the future (4) Interactive style – people learn from the past, value present good things, take responsibility for the future (Gołębniak, 1998)
  • Shared social practice - sharing the same space and time
  • Social practice – interrelation between student, teacher and a milieu they are in
  • Syllabus – organisation of content which focuses on content (subject matter) of an individual subject
  • Transdisciplinary – most evolved form of cross-disciplinary collaboration. The work of the team is highly integrated and organised according to comprehensive constructs and methods that transcend the conventional academic or professional disciplinary structure.

 


References


    Foucault, M. (2012). Discipline & punish: The birth of the prison. Vintage.

    Gołębniak, B.D. (1998). Zmiany edukacji nauczycieli. Wiedza – biegłość - refleksyjność [Changes in teacher education. Knowledge – mastery - reflectivity]. Toruń-Poznań: Edytor s.c.

    Klus-Stańska, D. (2018). Paradygmaty dydaktyki: myśleć teorią o praktyce [Paradigms in

    didactics-teaching and learning: thinking about a practice with a theory]. Warsaw: PWN.

    Koczanowicz, L. (2015 ). Politics of Dialogue: Non-consensual Democracy and Critical

    Community . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

    Markee, N. (1997). Managing curricular innovation . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

    Mikrut, A. (2002). Geneza kształcenia zintegrowanego i jej znaczenie dla kształtowania kompetencji uczniów klas początkowych [Genesis of integrated education and its meaning for competence formation of primary school students]. In J. Wyczesany & A. Mikrut (Eds.), Kształcenie zintegrowane dzieci o specjalnych potrzebach edukacyjnych [Integrated education for children with special needs]. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Akademii Pedagogicznej